


means and ends

by scribblscrabbl



Series: Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Politics, American Politics, M/M, Political AU, West Wing AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 06:32:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5858053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblscrabbl/pseuds/scribblscrabbl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The White House deals with a tragedy, Eames gets a visitor from across the pond, and Yusuf caps off a legislative victory with a show.</p>
            </blockquote>





	means and ends

**Author's Note:**

> In (mostly terrified) anticipation of the Iowa caucuses, I present to you part two.

Arthur can’t honestly say he’s a morning person. He enjoys the act of waking up early as much as he enjoys bringing his car in for an oil change or compromising with Senate Republicans. There’s nothing pleasurable about it; it’s just necessary. Occasionally soul-crushing, but necessary.

On days like today, though, he catches himself smiling, just a little. Because the air still has a bite, leftover from a long dark winter, but it _smells_ warmer than it feels, like heavy silken petals and swaths of verdant green. Because the only signs of life at the Reflecting Pool are the ducks leaving ripples in their wake. Because in the middle of his five-mile run he’s standing in front of the Lincoln memorial watching the sunrise set fire to the stone and he still can’t wrap his head around it, around how he grew up in Winchester, Wisconsin, population 1,676, just about 2,000 with the cows included, and ended up here.

“Delightful weather for a morning run, isn’t it?”

Arthur spins around. Eames is standing at the bottom of the steps in sweatpants and a Georgetown Law sweatshirt and sweat stains, looking unjustly attractive.

“Have you been following me?”

“As scintillating as your company is, darling, I can do without it for up to eight hours at a time. Shocking, I know,” Eames tells him with half a smile that seems to be saying the exact opposite. Arthur decides it’s a trick of the light.

He turns back to the sculpture and waits until he hears Eames walk up behind him then stop, heat at the edge of his awareness. It’s a rare thing, their bodies at rest instead of in furious motion, in perpetual danger of colliding.

“This – the memorial, the pool,” he says to the space at large, “it’s always been my favorite part of the city. The architecture is incredible, I could sit here for hours. You feel something – _momentous_ , you know? And it’s more than just history. It’s not just about looking back to remember how we got here, it’s about – looking forward to see where we can go.”

“ _It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced_ ,” Eames recites, in that melodic tone Arthur heard at length just once, the time Eames spoke at his alma mater a week after Super Tuesday. Arthur had dug it up on YouTube the night he moved into town, sitting on the floor of his living room, bare from edge to edge save for a single box with L.R. scrawled on four sides and a six-pack on top. The resolution was shitty but the speech came through loud and clear, beautifully hypnotic – the kind of oratory from a golden age long past – and afterwards Arthur had sat with his back against the wall in absolute silence with his lukewarm beer, thinking about how people go about making history.

“Show off,” he grumbles, turning around again to head down the steps as he glances at his watch.

“Yusuf’s doing the thing tonight. I have no shame in admitting I’ve waited weeks – ”

“Wait,” Arthur stops dead in his tracks, “Yusuf said he’s doing the thing tonight?”

Eames passes him, throwing him a sidelong glance. “Before he left the office yesterday he said, ‘I’m doing the thing tomorrow.’”

“Jesus, what – _what_ would possess him to say that? It would literally only be okay if he was actually possessed by a demonic spirit. We don’t have it locked down until it’s fucking locked down, Eames. How many bills have we seen go off the rails in the final hour? Don’t,” Arthur pinches the bridge of his nose, “answer that.”

“You’ve worked on this for months, Arthur. We all have. There will be no going off the rails, not this time,” Eames says, quietly, and Arthur can’t stand that either – Eames knowing he’s not being crazy, knowing he makes every defeat personal and feels it like a broken bone that’s never the same again and aches with the seasons. “We’ll be five votes up, we’ll have some champagne, and Yusuf will do the thing.”

It’s Eames’s shtick, making everything sound less impossible than it is, and it works like a fucking charm, every time.

“Yea,” Arthur breathes, and starts down the steps again, “yea, okay.”

When their paths diverge at the bottom, Eames adds, with a smile that rarely comes out during working hours, “for the record, I did follow you. Your backside looks far too delectable in athletic wear.”

*

“ _Afternoon, everyone, splendid day for a pressing briefing. Don’t you just love it when the world still makes sense by lunchtime?_ ”

“ _Not at all. Makes for a boring front page._ ”

“ _Yea, sorry, Yusuf, siding with Dana today._ ”

“ _Seeing as I blatantly play favorites, you probably want to stay on my good side._ ”

“ _It’s more fun keeping you on your toes._ ”

“I think Dana has a thing for Yusuf,” Ariadne says casually between sips of her fancy cappuccino.

Arthur turns away from the row of screens, blinking. “A thing? What are we, fifth graders?”

Ariadne shrugs, equally casually. “I’m just saying, she likes pushing his buttons. There’s a lot of button-pushing.”

“That sounds disturbingly inappropriate.”

“I’m telling you, she has a thing. And he doesn’t discourage it. Frankly, the whole thing’s painfully obvious.”

Arthur watches her carefully this time, the small line deepening between her eyebrows, the downward pull of her mouth. “Are you jealous? You’re jealous. Yusuf? Really?”

When he stops to think about it, though, it’s not surprising at all. They’re cut from the same cloth, Ariadne and Yusuf. They’re both quick to laugh and slow to anger, sharp-witted, loose-tongued, relentless defenders of the First Amendment, and aggressively fond of cats.

“Who’s jealous?” Eames appears behind them. “How dare you gossip in my absence.”

“No one’s jealous,” Ariadne says, scowling into her mug. “Arthur’s being a – ”

“Oh my god,” someone says suddenly and Arthur reflexively glances back up at the news.

“Oh my god,” he hears Ariadne echo weakly.

“ – _and 37 injured, making this the deadliest terrorist attack the country has seen since the bombing of Bastille metro station in 1983_ – ”

On CNN, the entrances to de Gaulle’s Terminal 2 are clogged with ambulances and paramedics, a phalanx of police directing terrified travelers, the wounded on stretchers interspersed with the dead.

Arthur watches the aftermath unfold, chest cold, and he doesn’t think about the military retaliation or the political fallout. He thinks about the faces they’ll identify in the next 24 hours and who’s been left behind to mourn. He thinks about his mother, his sister, Eames, Ariadne, everyone he wouldn’t be able to stand living without, present one second and gone the next.

On the adjacent screen, Hilary interrupts the briefing to hand her boss a slip of paper. Arthur watches Yusuf read the note and touch the left edge of his glasses, as if to tell himself, _steady_ , before looking up at his press corps.

“ _We just got an update from the Pentagon. Approximately one hour ago, three unidentified males armed with assault rifles opened fire on travelers at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Local authorities are reporting at least 15 dead_.”

*

“Paging Arthur Klein, Deputy Chief of Staff, you’re needed on Planet Earth.”

Arthur starts, sloshing cold coffee over the rim of his cup and onto his left cuff, and drags his attention away from the news. Ariadne’s leaning against the doorframe, mouth twitching but eyes tired, telling him she feels like she might’ve aged a dozen years, give or take, since waking up this morning.

“Goddamn it, now I need a new shirt.” He sets the cup down and wipes off the excess liquid with a used napkin from lunch.

“Is Dom with the President?”

“Yea, they’re in the Situation Room. Shut the door, will you? I have a meeting with Rory Smith from the penny lobby in fifteen,” he says, getting up to grab the spare shirt hanging off the side of his bookshelf, perfectly pressed by the cleaners down the block he gets Andy to sweet talk into agreeing to entirely unreasonable demands.

“I’m sorry, the _penny_ lobby?” Ariadne stares. “As in the small copper-plated disc with Lincoln’s face stamped on it that costs more to produce than it’s worth?”

“More specifically, one group of the penny lobby,” Arthur clarifies, yanking off his tie and shedding his coffee-stained shirt. “Americans for Common Cents.”

Ariadne gurgles a little. “Is that a joke?”

“Look at my face, Ariadne. Do I look like I’m joking?”

“Hard to tell with you sometimes. Dom asked you to take the meeting, didn’t he,” she says, sounding gleeful now, painted in that sadistic streak she hides so well in polite company. “He gave you the speech about Jackson’s big block of cheese. Opening our humble doors to the American people.”

That speech, Arthur suspects, is actually despotism villainously cloaked in democracy. “I’m still being punished for telling McCaffey he’d be a saint if he got on his knees for his God as often as he got on his knees for the NRA.”

“Not your finest moment. Clearly this is your opportunity to truly show your _penny-tence_.”

Arthur pauses in the middle of retying his tie. “You know I can tell Eames to put you on speechwriting duty for the Deputy Small Business Administrator, length of assignment indefinite.”

“He wouldn’t listen to you,” she scoffs, then starts sidling to the door.

“He listens to me more than you think,” he says cryptically, centering the knot of his half Windsor with an instinct honed by a professional life mostly defined in terms of the amount of coffee that doesn’t make it into his mouth.

“I have to go do important things now,” Ariadne announces, stepping into the hallway and then hovering over the threshold, a hand on the door. “They killed 18 people in the name of God. Two of them were children.”

Arthur looks at her and pulls on his jacket.

“Yea. I know.”

He knows she and Eames are drafting remarks, and he wonders how you put that kind of violence on paper, how you do it justice without giving them the satisfaction of thinking they’ve won. How in these moments you don’t feel betrayed by the finite scope of human language when the range of human emotion feels terrifyingly infinite.

“How do you move on from this? How do you stare into the face of this – delusion, this _apathy_ towards suffering and still think you can change something?”

“I don’t know,” he says, because the self-evident truth is the world doesn’t make sense, and there’s no use in cooking up empty logic, “but we try anyway, because that’s what we do.”

Ariadne gives him a small smile, telling him she never considered the alternative but it’s still nice hearing it out loud.

“Yea. I know.”

*

“Hey, Dom’s back in his office.”

He looks up from his computer and Andy’s standing at his door, paging through a stack of files leaning dangerously to the left. The “Go Green” initiative launched during the last presidency and, after something like three years and two months, it’s still in its “rocky start” phase, which has come as a surprise to no one seeing as the amount of information that needs to be digitized and archived requires a production line on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, and CBO seemed to have left off a 0 when they submitted the cost projections.

“Okay, thanks,” he says, digging two fingers into the crick in his neck that’s starting to creep in and feed his headache, “I need to – I’m gonna go over there now.”

Andy raises a lofty eyebrow and Arthur’s pretty sure he taught her that. “I assumed you would, yes.”

“Yea. Okay, good. I’m going now.”

When he starts down the hallway, she falls into step, and it comforts him a little, the cadence of their combined footfalls, the smell of the conditioner she swears by that makes her hair baby soft, which she’d gone about proving by making everyone pet it awkwardly.

“I heard they packed the guns in violin cases. I seriously don’t know what we can trust anymore. What’s next, baby strollers?” There’s outrage in her voice that fractures a little with every word, and Arthur feels that cold lump in his chest again, that feeling of being powerless, calcified, lodged between his ribs. “They walked around the check-in area for close to an hour before they opened fire. How was that not suspicious?”

They take the turn to the Oval Office and Arthur swerves to avoid a mail cart. “The unofficial explanation? They didn’t look Muslim.”

Andy falls silent until they get to Karen’s office. Then she stops him with bright, fierce eyes.

“Someone needs to say, before we can do better, we need to _be_ better,” she tells him quietly. “We need to be better, Arthur.”

Arthur looks at her, silent because they both know it’s a given: Mal would say it. Mal would see it as her obligation as a decent goddamn human being, and so would the rest of them. Only, the irony is, people watch a tragedy of this scale unfold and they don’t want lessons in morality – a bloodless response. They want vengeance, insurance against the madmen playing God and targeting their husbands and their children.

“Thanks for getting a hold of the DOT memo,” he tells Andy before walking the ten paces to Dom’s desk, which, par for the course, looks like it’s been struck by a highly localized tornado and would probably have to be reported as a breach of public trust if Dom weren’t so damn good at his job.

“Is Eames done with the statement?”

Dom looks up, blinking like he’s been trapped in his own head for days.

“Yea, the President’s going over it now.” He sets down his pen and rubs at his jaw. “It’s good.”  
That means Eames is probably outside somewhere, burning through a whole pack of Dunhills so the adrenaline can wear off, head tipped back, eyes closed, frowning over the weakest lines and murmuring them until they let him go.

“We still haven’t gotten the green light on Guzman’s confirmation hearing. I think Ritter’s trying to drag it out until the Tea Party can prove we’re spearheading a secret campaign to sneak undocumented immigrants into positions of power.”

Dom squints for a prolonged moment, as if Arthur’s the one letting him down by being soft on nutjobs.

“Go through Reynolds on this. I don’t want us to be seen making deals with – ”

“Yea, I’m on it,” Arthur says, drumming his fingers against the edge of the chair Dom uses mostly to test how much discomfort people are willing to suffer for their government. “The President’s spoken to the families?”

“As soon as they identified the kids,” Dom says evenly, the way he does when it’s costing him, rupturing something that’ll stay out of sight until he gets home and locks the door behind him. “19 and 20, on a spring break trip to Paris. If they’d flown out on an earlier flight. Just one hour early.”

It’s something you don’t talk about on the campaign trail, in between rallies and eating fried food on a stick, sprawled in a corner of the bus trying to come up with something profound about corn. It’s the kind of defeat you don’t guard against until it’s knocking down your door, and Arthur thinks this is why Mal should’ve married when she had the chance – so on days like this when she goes home, someone’s there to shoulder her weight for a while.

He’s about to say getting caught up in what ifs is a dangerous way to live when there’s a knock on the door.

“Admiral Saito is here for you, Dom,” Karen says, serenely even though Arthur knows Saito scares the living daylights out of her.

“Arthur,” Saito says as he strolls in, equipped with the kind of voice that could probably carry across the length of a football field but only if circumstances necessitated it, “I hope I’m not interrupting anything of national importance.”

“Admiral,” Arthur nods and smiles because he’s always admired the way Saito commands a room – as graciously as a host pouring you tea and still never letting you forget he could obliterate all traces of you from the Earth by twitching an eyebrow, “no, just politics.”

Saito’s mouth twitches. “Dominick, you probably need to keep an eye on this one.”

“Don’t I know it,” Dom mutters. “You need an audience with the President?”

“No. No, she has enough on her mind right now I’m sure. It’s nothing that needs her attention yet.”

“And that’s my cue,” Arthur says, turning to leave. “Good to see you, Admiral.”

“Hey, Arthur,” Dom calls after him, “Eames is pretty tied up the rest of the day so, uh, just give him some space. Ariadne, too. And maybe don’t go see Yusuf either.”

“Okay,” Arthur says slowly, glancing sharply back at Dom because it sounds nonchalant and sketchy as hell, which means Dom’s trying to hide something even though he knows he’s useless at deception, a shortcoming that makes perfect sense for someone whose job essentially entails calling politicians on their bullshit behind closed doors. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

When he walks out, Karen glances up from her computer to say, sympathetically, “I’ve always rooted for you, Arthur.”

“ _What_ the fuck is going on,” Arthur says once he steps out into the hallway, startling an aide walking past, then decides he needs more coffee, maybe a giant cookie if they still have double chocolate chip.

Ariadne waylays him before he makes it to the mess.

“You haven’t seen Eames, have you?” she asks casually, falling into step as he heads to the East staircase.

Arthur takes a second to deliberate the hints that have been dropped.

“Eames hasn’t done something that’ll make me want to set fire to his desk, has he.”

It’s actually a threat he’s employed before, the time Eames went behind his back and scheduled him to go on the Tonight Show, knowing it’s the kind of public appearance he avoids at all costs because he’s not a fucking _people_ person, which is a truth about him Eames enjoys resisting with a bloody-mindedness that drives him crazy. None of them had ended up going on account of a reply-all war erupting on the secure email server that alerted both the CIA and the NSA, but Eames had still found the opportunity to tell Arthur he was shortchanging himself, with a cryptic smile Arthur chose not to decipher in case it dragged him too close to the lines they had drawn, piecewise, as they’d gotten closer to victory.

“Not – exactly,” Ariadne hedges.

They walk into the mess and Arthur swoops in on the last double chocolate chip cookie, then makes a beeline for the coffee.

“Don’t you have anything better to do than annoy me with vague insinuations about Eames?”

Coffee in hand, he picks the closest empty seat. Ariadne pauses before sitting down across from him.

“Eames’s ex is here,” she blurts out. “In his office.”

“I’m sorry?” Arthur blinks, cookie halfway to his mouth. “I don’t understand. Ex what?”

“Oh my god, Arthur. _Girlfriend_. The _British poet laureate_ , can you believe it? Super hot, insanely smart, incredibly well-dressed. Definitely out of Eames’s league.”

“Um,” is all Arthur can think to say at the moment because there’s a slight roaring in his ears, a tightening of his throat, an irregularity in his heartbeat, all pointing to a condition he’d rather not diagnose.

“She’s doing a reading at the Library of Congress tonight. Apparently the event sold out faster than a Taylor Swift concert.”

“Wait,” Arthur says, “ _Dom_ knew about this? How the hell – and Karen? Jesus, was there a goddamn memo circulating?”

He doesn’t say _that I missed_ , but Ariadne gives him a sad look.

“I snooped around a little before Eames threatened to fire me and drew the blinds. It’s not definitely ex, Arthur. It’s maybe ex. It’s ‘there’s a shit-ton of history and it’s complicated’ ex. It’s ‘maybe we can get to know each other again Biblically’ ex.”

Arthur opens his mouth to tell her he gets the gist but she holds up an aggressive finger to shut him up.

“I’m sure she’s a lovely person. But she’s not you. Maybe she made sense to Eames before, but you – ”

“Ariadne,” he cuts in, voice low and dangerous, “this is not a conversation I’ll be having with you. Here, or anywhere. Now, I’m gonna finish my cookie and my coffee, and then I’m gonna go back to doing my job.”

Ariadne stares at him, disappointment writ large on her face, and Arthur stares stoically back like he has no stake in Eames’s love life, past, present, or future.

“It doesn’t have to be either or, you know,” she finally says, quiet. “You could have both.”

“No,” he says without hesitation, “I can’t.”

*

Arthur gives the communications bullpen a wide berth because he tells himself he’s not a masochist despite what his CV and his relationships – mostly consisting of career politicians who wouldn’t hesitate to screw him – might suggest.

Ten minutes after getting back to his office, he has five browser tabs pulled up on Olivia Murray – two older brothers, raised amid the stark beauty of the Scottish moors, published poet since the age of 15 with a degree in Applied Mathematics and a highly publicized record of speaking out against human trafficking, including being thrown in a Myanmar jail for three months for inciting civil unrest. She’s stunning, that much is also clear just by looking at the picture on her Wikipedia page – turning away from the camera, brown curls windblown, smiling, maybe for someone behind her who’s just called her name. And when Arthur quits out of the tabs one by one, it’s that smile he can’t shake off. It’s the smile, out of everything, that makes him think Eames must’ve been in love with her, that he could be still, because it professes the kind of joy, pure and wholly uncomplicated, that’s hard-won for most people but instinctive for Eames. It makes him think about the one time, three years ago, he’d burst into Eames’s office grinning like a lunatic because after 100-plus hours of canvassing they were finally climbing in the polls, and the first thing Eames had said in response was he should smile more often – said, breathless, _you could pull off a bloodless coup if you keep smiling like that_ , and sounded so goddamn sure.

“Hey,” Andy pops her head in, “everyone’s watching the role call now. Yusuf’s about to – ”

“Andy, Jesus – _ow_ ,” he says, banging his thighs against his desk, “what have I told you? Don’t tempt the wrath of – ”

“The whatever from high whatever thing,” she finishes, flapping a hand impatiently. “You know I’m starting to think that running a country is just a lot of pretending to know what you’re doing, name-calling, and hoping for the best.”

Arthur locks his computer, mouth twitching, then walks out and closes the door behind him.

“There are two things in this world you never want to see get made,” he says as they walk over to the Roosevelt room, “laws and sausages.”

When they round the corner, Olivia Murray is leaning outside the doorway, cutting a magnificent figure in a cream-colored suit, curls swept up in a simple chignon, eyes steadfast on someone inside until she hears them approaching.

“You must be Arthur,” she says, smiling. He can see now that no picture would do her justice.

“Olivia Murray, Poet Laureate,” he says.

When they shake hands, he sees Eames standing next to Mal, tie missing, the top two buttons of his shirt undone, glancing at them before turning away and downing his entire glass of champagne.

“Big night for you,” Olivia says. “It’s probably one of those things you never get used to, isn’t it.”

“Yea, you never do.” Arthur smiles a little. “What about you? Your run-of-the-mill reading?”

“Oh no, I’ve never been cured of my stage fright,” she grins. “Every time feels like primary school all over again, tripping over the nativity scene in the Christmas play and breaking Mary’s nose.”

Well, shit. He could actually learn to like her.

“That’s why I leave the public speaking to Eames,” he tells her. “He has better balance.”

She laughs, which is when he decides he could bear it if he lost to her.

“You and Eames – you two have been through a lot,” she says after a pause.

He looks over at Eames again, play-sparring with Yusuf now, back hunched and hands up in loose fists like a prizefighter, and feels, acutely, their four years slipping away from him, a continual erosion making this life disappear by degrees.

“No more than anyone else,” he deflects, turning back to Olivia, discreetly searching her for what she already knows. “It’s all by choice. You – you know what the great thing about democracy is? The majority sees right through you. They might not know everything about you, they might only have some foggy idea of what the future should look like, but they can tell if you lack conviction. And, well – if they make a mistake, it’s only the next four years.”

Olivia laughs again then peers at him, looking oddly satisfied.

“ _Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed, let it be that great strong land of love, where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme, that any man be crushed by one above_ ,” she says, low and warm, inflection beautifully measured.

“You have no idea how many times I’ve gotten that one from Eames,” Arthur says, smiling.

“No – I suppose I don’t,” she says, considering. “Good luck, Arthur.”

“You, too.” Then he watches her walk away and turn the corner, before stepping into the room.

“You missed it,” Eames says, popping up beside him with a flute of champagne. “Bishop voted yea. We’ve got it.”

Arthur just takes the champagne and knocks it back like it’s that first tequila shot of the night that starts the steep descent towards humiliation and regret but you take it anyway because the alternative isn’t a whole lot better.

“Eames – ” he says, looking at the exhilaration in Eames’s eyes, at odds with the exhaustion around his mouth. “You didn’t have to hide her from me.”

Eames’s brightness dims a little and Arthur hates it, hates that he can do that to Eames.

“I wasn’t sure I had the time to see her, but – I haven’t seen her in three years and she has this inexplicable aversion to travel. Arthur, it’s not what it looks like.”

“Eames, don’t. You don’t owe me anything,” Arthur cuts in, thinking they shelved that ledger a long time ago. “This has nothing to do with – ”

“No – look,” Eames says, plainly aggravated, “I know you sorted out your priorities and I didn’t fight you then. I was okay with it because – Christ, we got ourselves into the big leagues and you don’t go fucking that up. But I saw Liv today and I saw what I’d already given up to be here, saw what we could’ve had because we had been good, once, and – shit, I’m messing this all up. This isn’t about her. This is about you and me and how that’s not _separate_ from any of this. I can extricate you from me as easily as I can shut out the words in my head, can you not see that? The two of us – we’re a forgone conclusion.”

Arthur stopped breathing somewhere along the way. Arthur looks at Eames with all his bloody-mindedness and his words, deliberate and off-the-cuff, carving spaces in him with a breadth and depth that would, in perpetuity, fit Eames and no one else – and he’s opening his mouth to say something that in a best-case scenario would be half as eloquent, when the music starts up.

Immediately there’s a few subtle cat-calls and a smattering of applause.

Next to them, Dom says to Mal, “Saito came by today to revisit the proliferation concern with – ”

“Dominick Cobb, so help me God I will replace Karen with a Republican if you ruin this moment for me,” Mal says evenly, then sips her champagne, watching as Yusuf walks out to the front of the room and pulls off his tie to another round of cat-calls, then tosses it to Ariadne, who pretends to swoon and ties it around her head.

“There’s something bizarrely soothing about this,” Eames murmurs.

Yusuf widens his stance and jerks his champagne glass up to his chin, pointing at the crowd to say, for the next four minutes we’re all fucking rockstars.

 _Rising up, back on the street_  
_Did my time, took my chances_  
_Went the distance, now I'm back on my feet_  
_Just a man and his will to survive_

“It actually scares me, how good he is at this,” Arthur says, leaning his hip against the couch and just basking in the afterglow of victory.

_Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past  
You must fight just to keep them alive_

With the roll call done, C-SPAN’s just showing an empty floor, the tally of yeas and nays still stamped at the bottom under the announcement, “U.S. Senate: Minimum Wage Bill Passed,” and Arthur thinks no, you never get used to it.

 _It's the eye of the tiger_  
_It's the thrill of the fight_  
_Rising up to the challenge of our rival_

“You want me to hold yours?” Arthur says, nodding at Eames’s flute.

“Darling,” Eames quirks an eyebrow, which is when Yusuf throws his glass clean across the room and Eames snatches it out of the air with one hand, “I’m a professional.”

In Arthur’s defense, the first time Yusuf put on his show it was election night – hors d’oeuvres spread onto two tables on either end of the room, Mal in a sharp, ivory Galliano suit with beaded lapels, two speeches ready for the teleprompter – and the glass had fallen into the shrimp cocktail, the ensuing splatter narrowly missing Mal’s elbow. It was the same night Arthur had shoved Eames into a supply closet, throat tingling from the champagne, and sucked him off even though it broke all the rules, because it was either that or crashing the fucking car on the way back to the hotel from being too keyed up over a win that felt like a validation of all the hours he spent not sleeping to _believe_ in something.

Arthur remembers all this and laughs, watching Yusuf rock out on his air guitar to the fading refrain of an undying anthem.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem Olivia recites is Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again."
> 
> West Wing references abound; I am too lazy to credit them all. Just take a second to bow down to the genius of Aaron Sorkin.


End file.
